Wandering Sword – Starter Guide

This is not a comprehensive nor golden guide. Rather it is how I played the early game, and some useful tips / tricks to share.

Guide to Start

Basics

Weapon Choice

For starter, sword is the best. It has good range and damage, plus early availability of good moves and good weapon. Saber / hidden weapon / polar-arm / fist are all equally viable, but the access to moves & weapon are rarer — it will take extra effort to learn good moves by gifting others + consulting.

Martial Points

Most important resource, obtained by reading and battles.

It is best spent on cultivation methods, which improves the health, stat, plus many useful buffs. Whenever possible, improve cultivation!

Lightness is very useful for real-time battle vs boss, so definitely worth improving.

For the moves,1-2 per category suffices. There are good moves in every weapon choice. For sword player, there are some really useful early-game moves that improves evade and adds health.

Meridian Map

Improve the stats, it is pretty minor in early game though.

Life skills

Early game there is no need to improve the life skills, because after you join Wudang, you can learn from all the senior teachers.

Equipment

In early game, take girl in red or Mowen to do a few side-quests and random encounters, you will get very good equipment from random battles.

Gift / Spar / Consult

The affinity needs to be at least 20 to spar, which give you 1-3 items.

Each gift usually add 4, and occasionally 12 affinity if they really like it. The affinity needs 60 for companions to join, but there are usually some plot-based affinity.

As the affinity increases to 70 and above, companion missions will trigger. Sometimes the companion rejects your gift, that means there is some mission to be completed first, before you can improve their affinity further.

Consulting is the best way to learn cultivation methods / life-skills from companion or other senior people.

Companion

Companions help you win over random encounters, gain martial points together with you, and you can learn cultivation + moves from them.

Battle modes

Real time battle is a much better way to farm martial points and get through random encounters, as companions are controlled by AI and everyone moves together.

Turn-based is usually better for close fight, because of complete control.

However, the game has many 1-vs-1 battle using protagonist. In this case, you can time your move when enemy is about to attack — to completely evade their attack, go far away to rest, or go to their back to strike. In this case, real time battle is really fun and pretty much the only way to win an under-dog fight.

Companion Guide

This will cover a brief walk-through of the early game.

Yuwen Yi

The main protagonist, with a terrible stat and just an average person. However, he has the best potential in game. He learns the best cultivation in Mount Wanzi prison, and the only one who learn any martial arts + cultivation methods.

Learning from companion is easiest, just go back to starting village to rest and learn until all martial points are spent. On the other hand, companions can only learn from the textbooks, not from you nor any others. In the end I really like how he is designed.

Wei Huo

Recruit in starting village. Stat-wise he is as weak as the main protagonist, and polar-arm is underwhelming in early game.

Girl in red

After the world map is available, immediately go to Luo Village then Mount Wanzi. You will meet her after coming out of the prison. Given how good she is, you may go back to world map, and let her help you leveling up and recruiting Shangguan.

Shangguan Hong

With good stat and sword mastery, she is easily the best companion in-game.

After girl in red joins, instead of finishing the Mount Wanzi quest, go back to world map and to PingKang city for the “wealthy begger” quest. Finish “Wealthy Begger”, and gift Shangguan until her affinity is 40, it will trigger her joining quest at Qingmu sect (east of world map). Having the red girl in team is essential, because there are several tough enemies along the quest lines. After two more side quests, defeat Shangguan 1-vs-1, which is do-able in real time battle.

For sword player, it is a great investment to get Shangguan early on, because you can learn some really useful sword moves from the quest-lines and from her. After getting Shangguan, go finish Mount Wanzi, which will give you another great sword move.

Bai Jin

After finishing Mount Wanzi, you will meet Bai Jin in Luo’s village. There are two side quests to complete in order to recruit him, which should be pretty easy with Shangguan in team. Bai Jin is not that strong, but uses hidden weapon and a decent addition to the squad.

Sima Ling

After Shangguan joins, raise her affinity to 70 to trigger another companion mission at Qingmu Sect. Complete the Baidi trial for Shangguan. Then go back to Qingmu Sect and talk to Sima Ling to trigger her joining mission.

IMO she is the second best companion just after Shangguan.

Mowen

After finishing Mount Wanzi and red girl left, go to Wudang, and Mowen will temporarily join.

This concludes the early-game guide. After joining Wudang, the “real” main quest line finally start.

You will meet three major female companions from the main quest line, and able to recruit several side-quests companions as story goes.

The main quest is well-done, and several side-quests are also very engaging. Since this is a starting guide, I will just stop it here without any spoiler.

My only complaint is they should give Shangguan and Sima an ending cutscene – given how long we fight together from beginning to end, that is a huge emotional miss to me.